9 Thought-Provoking Lessons From the Best TED Talks of 2014.

The presents have been opened. The guests have gone home. It’s time to get into your jammies and snuggle down on the sofa for some well-deserved relaxation and maybe a little TV: It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street, or one of the many versions of A Christmas Carol. But if you’d like to start 2015 with a big dose of inspiration, consider spending some of your viewing time on 47 enlightening speeches published by TED during 2014.

To make this prospect as tempting as possible, the TED folks have assembled aneight-minute video of the highlights from these talks which is guaranteed to get you curious about at least a few of them (or all of them, if you’re me).

The TED folks have helpfully broken the talks down by theme, so you can go right for what interests you the most. Taken together, these videos add up to a quick infusion of insight, and some important lessons we should all take away from 2014:

2. Medicine takes a leap forward.

Hugh Herr shows how bionics mean you don’t need to have legs to dance. Doctors on the cutting edge show how to find cancer way before it’s a threat and how to make a fold-up microscope for 50 cents. And one brave physician explains why patients and doctors are frightened of each other.

And finally, psychologist Dan Gilbert skewers our human misconception that who we are today will bear any resemblance to who we’re going to be in 10 years. “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished,” he declares. That’s a truth we should all keep in mind as we head into 2015.